Many people learn to code because they want to write a computer game. Moreoften than not, they want to re-write their favourite game, but making it alittle easier! Unfortunately the gap between a personal project, open sourcegame, and professional offering is substantial, with the lack of polishobvious at every turn. In this talk, Steven Goodwin, a game developer of 20years standing (and 3 books on the subject), dissects each discipline (art,music, writing, and code) to explain where polish should be added and why it’sso rare to see open source games as effective as their commercialcounterparts. In theory, an open source game should be much better than a commercialversion. After all, as a group, we have more resources at our disposal, overmore time, in order to build more assets, write more code, and fix more bugs.But that’s rarely true. Our efforts look rushed and amateur in comparison.After a brief discussion on the meta-problems of open source game developmentwe look at each discipline and demonstrate what needs to be written to improvethe game, details of simple, but effective, visual improvements that can bedone with very little effort, and how certain functionality can be implementedin order to make a game shine. The talk also includes a checklist of featuresimplemented in Space Bounce that, while you might not have noticed them, youwould certainly realize if they weren’t there.